it helps on the cause of religion and charity. Making rosary beads or scapulars belongs to this category.
3. Public trading is also forbidden on Sundays, as well as judicial proceedings in the exercise of contentious jurisdiction, and the solemn and public taking of oaths (Can. 1248).
English municipal law goes farther than the law of the Church in its provisions for the due observance of the Lord's Day. Thus not only is Sunday a dies non for the sitting of courts or the meeting of public bodies, but contracts such as are within the ordinary calling of tradesmen, workmen, labourers, or other persons of the same sort, made and completed on Sunday, are void, and abstention from work and even from play is required by a series of statutes. [1]
Although these provisions of the civil authority do not impose an obligation in conscience under pain of sin, yet indirectly they have caused the Sunday to be observed among us with greater strictness than is absolutely required by ecclesiastical law.
4. As we saw with regard to the hearing of Mass, so in this matter too, if the precept cannot be observed without serious inconvenience, it ceases to bind. And so, work in foundries or in agriculture which cannot be stopped without grave inconvenience and loss may be done on Sundays. Work, too, in the direct service of religion, or necessary works of charity connected with the care and nursing of the sick, or the burying of the dead, are not forbidden. Custom permits of the sweeping of the house and the cooking of meals, and certain other more or less necessary occupations on Sunday. Finally, ecclesiastical authority can, for good reason, dispense in the observance of this law. Not only Bishops, but priests who have the cure of souls, have discretionary power to give dispensations in particular cases. [2]
